Tuesday, October 2, 2012

Crowdsourcing the Annual Meeting Stage Two: Get Out the Vote

The Alliance is trying a lot of new things this year, sometimes
using the principles of rapid prototyping
to test new ideas and learn from our experiments. Those of you who sew may
appreciate the fact that I think of some of these trials as basting together
the patterns we are working on.

One of our experiments (instigated by the awesome folks who
bring you the miracle of orchestration that is the AAM annual meeting each
year) is crowdsourcing
input on session proposals. Back in July we invited you to post your ideas
to our session proposal site, comment on other folks’ proposals, and help
session chairs find
appropriate speakers.

You were generous with your input, both on the sessions and
on the design glitches of the (basted together) site itself. (One of the recent
trends spotted by cultural media mavens has been dubbed “Flawsome”
–customers feeling good about brands that are honest about their flaws, showing
some humility and humor. With that in mind, I feel better about sharing the
fact that I managed to “break” the site at least a dozen times myself.)

By the closing date for proposals, people submitted 550 sessions
that will go to the National Program Committee when it meets next week. This week you have the chance for a
second round of input—voting
for your favorite proposals.

Full disclosure: there is no specific formula for how your
votes will be used. The program committee members will use the vote count to
inform their decision making, but there is no formal outcome such as NEMA’s “45 Minutes of Fame” people’s choice
award to pick a keynote for their 2012 meeting. (Maybe next year!) However, as
the Alliance wets its toes in the waters of popular input, the level of
participation we see in voting will help us decide what to do next year. Give more
power to the people by improving and expanding the process? Abandon the
experiment?

Preview of the voting site. First, sign in with your AAM id.
(You can sign up for a free login id without being a member of the Alliance.)
Then you can:

·Filter sessions by either format or subject area or keyword tag (but not a combination)

·Browse sessions by reading descriptions, one at
a time. Keep notes, so you can go back to find promising candidates again if
you don’t vote for them right away.

·Vote by “Liking” a session. You can like an
unlimited number of sessions (but be careful, you can’t unlike a session once it is selected).

·You can only “like” a session once. You are, of
course, free to use personal connections, social media, or any other avenue of
communications to lobby others to vote for sessions you are particularly enthusiastic
about.

Please let us know via email
if you have problems with the site, and use the comments section, below, to
suggest how you would like it to work differently, and better, next year. Links
to other proposal site you think are particularly well-done would be very
useful.

Voting closes at the end of the day this Friday, October 5.
Go forth and vote!